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Written and conceived by Stephan Crasneanscki, LOVOTIC is a concept album by Soundwalk Collective, composed in collaboration with lauded actress and singer/songwriter Charlotte Gainsbourg. Featuring veteran techno stalwart AtomTM, rising singer/composer/performance artist Lyra Pramuk, celebrated actor Willem Dafoe, and writer/philosopher Paul B. Preciado, the album is released by the new Berlin-based Analogue Foundation. Inspired by a relatively new field of research that seeks to explore and develop the possibilities of sexual and emotional relationships -- and even love -- between humans and robots, LOVOTIC interrogates the impulses, ideas, and needs underlying this phenomenon. The project ventures into a future where sex, intimacy, and desire are reformulated through the connection of humans, robotics, and artificial intelligence. At present, however, such technologies are primarily used to produce programs of limited sexual iterations that do not question the preformatted categories of gender and sexual orientation. In contrast, on LOVOTIC, Soundwalk Collective ask whether the future of sex and sexuality could instead be an exponentially expanding kaleidoscope. Sonically LOVOTIC is unidentifiable, artificial, and genuinely futuristic, occupying an amorphous androgynous netherworld at the borderlands between biotic and android. The production tangibly evokes the odd, rubbery textures of faux flesh, the slick virtual glide or glitchy mishaps of software, and the sleek shine of hardware. Gleaming sound design creates shard-like surfaces redolent of Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto's Glass, the slippery stretched sonics Gabor Lazar, and the unsettling dark ambience of TOWERS and Hallmark '87. At turns intimate and inviting, with whispering-in-your-ears ASMR vocals evoking blissful, heightened sexual states, within LOVOTIC there's optimism, but also unease; As well as the positive, it implies the negative ramifications of technology. Charlotte Gainsbourg invokes a being of unknown identity -- an artificial eve, the oracle and the portal --speaking from an unspecified time in the future. The voices of AtomTM, Lyra Pramuk and Willem Dafoe weave in and out of Charlotte's, often overlapping, merging into one another, expressing the entity of a being that's ephemeral and in constant flux, oscillating between the natural and artificial. The record's other bonafide singer, Lyra Pramuk's delivery alternates between spoken word, operatics and partially- unintelligible language. A multi-media project, LOVOTIC also features the work of writer, philosopher and curator Paul B. Preciado -- a leading thinker in the study of gender and body politics. Paul contributes a post-apocalyptic, quasi scientific and fictional text, which adds further fantasy, artistic and intellectual depth, augmenting the listener's experience. 180 gram clear vinyl; gold foil print; includes 16pp booklet.
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